Sneak Up On Your Material

Sneak up on your material. Don’t go crashing after it through the forest with a machete. Sit down, be quiet, let the material catch up with you.

CAROLYN SEE

The Smaller the Ball, the More Formidable the Literature

The smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature. There are superb books about golf, very good books about baseball, not many good books about football or soccer, very few good books about basketball and no good books at all about beach balls.

GEORGE PLIMPTON

The Fiction Writer Appeals Through the Senses

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

A Title Is Like A Magnet

I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.

LOUISE ERDRICH

It's Such A Tricky Thing, Being A Screenwriter

It’s such a tricky thing, being a screenwriter, a strange combination of talents. You have to have the instincts to want to express yourself like any writer, but at the same time you have to have a very powerful collaborative instinct.

BO GOLDMAN

There Is No Cure for Writer's Block

There is no cure for writer's block. If it persists into the third day the writer must abandon all hope of authorship and go into the family business. Those who refuse this common sense alternative should identify the source of the block. When it is the result of fear the writer must complete the work and submit it even if humiliation and death are sure to follow. When it is the result of visceral disinterest, which sometimes emerges after agreeing to write something or other, it is better to own up frankly and abandon the work.

THOMAS POWERS

Work in the Morning

Work in the morning, a short break for lunch, work in the afternoon and then watch the six o'clock news and then go back to work until bed-time. Before bed, listen to Schubert, preferably some songs.

COLM TÓIBÍN

Punctuation Ought to be as Conventional As Possible

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There's No Such Thing As Nonfiction

My feeling is that there's no such thing as nonfiction. Everything is fiction, because in the moment someone tries to relate an experience of what happened to them, it's gone. The reality that was felt at the moment is almost impossible to describe. It's one reason why there are writers, to come close to how it felt when it happened.

NORMAN MAILER

A Writer's Time

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

E.B. WHITE